So that he might have accurate transcripts, the doctoral student had been recording his patient interviews, thinking he might be able to get some grant money next cycle to have them transcribed. Which is to say, he didn’t have much to show for his research beyond the stacks of tape boxes on his desk, when in wheeled Dr. Lazlo Brunn, the mad babbler.
At Pickering, not a revolving-door operation but a well-funded private institution that tended its flower beds and kept its kitchen floors clean, an intake was an all-hands affair by virtue of its rarity. That first week, Lazlo Brunn talked nonstop, and since no one quite knew what to do with him, the student figured he’d make some tape just in case it turned out the patient’s diagnosis fell within the scope of his research. He wheeled his aluminum cart into Brunn’s room, introduced himself, got some gibberish in response, asked in turn if he could record their conversation—more gibberish but no physical signs of disagreement—and proceeded with his first question: How do you feel today, Doctor Brunn? The patient took one hour and four minutes to deliver his logatomic response, and he was still talking when the tape ran out.
The student was named Asher Schiff, the same Schiff who would later treat my father, and I’d come into possession of the tapes when I’d made a research mission up to the Bronx to see him, hoping he could tell me something about my own state of mind in those days immediately after the Vornados’ party.
The morning after the party, when I had emerged from my bedroom and asked who the man who’d been thrown over the balcony was, Schiff had been my father’s first phone call, and he’d trudged through the snow to our apartment that same day. As I understood it, we’d talked for a long time, and then I’d been to see him in his office several times after, but I had no recollection of his face, much less our conversations.
He apologized for not being able to speak extemporaneously on the subject of our sessions, but he couldn’t remember anything specific himself, and we descended into his basement, where he dug around in some old steel file cabinets until he found his notes, which weren’t much help, either.
According to this, he said, we met five times. Twice I came to you, and the other three, your parents brought you to my office. I never wrote much down, for legal reasons—standard practice, not because of the details of your case. So there’s not much here, I’m sorry to say. I see that I referred you to Sandy Stern. Did you see her for long?
I told him I had, about five years.
She’s who you should be talking to, he said, but she passed away some years back.
Yes, I said.
You already knew that, he said, and smiled. Suddenly I remembered his smile—crooked, rumpled, compassionate, the smile of an inveterate listener. Do you want to talk about anything now? he said.
Oh no, I said. I’ve done plenty of that, thank you.
I had only a vague idea of what I was looking for. Some clue that he’d seen Albert Caldwell peering out from within me, I suppose. Some written proof that I’d spoken like a guilt-ridden old lawyer.
So, I said. We’re like a couple of old war buddies who can’t remember the war.
He gave me that smile again, and a shrug that either meant, Oh ho, I remember the war all too well and I’m not opening that can of worms, or else it meant, simply, I’m sorry. Either way, there was no more conversation about that night in 1978. So we talked about other things. He was a lovely man. He asked about my father. When I told him I still lived at the Apelles he asked if I happened to know anyone in the Brunn family. Sure, I said. Follow me, he said. Up we went to his office on the second floor, a room with books for walls, towers of ancient journals and papers begetting yet more papers, two desks obscured by a long, long career’s worth of psychological detritus—the Egyptian reproductions, the old chess pieces, a graveyard of laptops, flowerpots where he’d cultivated twigs and dust. One smiling shelf was dentured with slender reel tape boxes, and he picked through them until he’d found the ones he was after.
You get old, you try to disburse, he said. The family might want these.
I thanked him for his time and took them home.
It took me a while to get around to the tapes. They slipped my mind, to be honest. I was a little preoccupied putting my house in order. I’d finally managed to dispatch the hundreds of photos of Vik into manila folders. His shirts had gone to the mission on 82nd Street, the same place Turk had taken her parents’ clothing. His coats, his shoes, all gone. I expected a sudden weightlessness, some bliss-of-purgation kind of uplift, a setting off on the open sea type of feeling. There was new space in the closet. Lightness in the drawers, extra shelves in the medicine
